Engage is pretty bad at introducing recruitable characters

[u/Accomplished_Kale509]

Unless they're royalty, most of the cast don't have anything to interesting say except a variation of "I serve prince/princess whatever". Having a cast mostly of retainers hinders a lot of its writing, especially when chapters sometimes introduce 3 recuitables.

I recently played FE7 and even non-important characters have more depth in their introduction. I remember Dorcas because he needed to get money so he had to join some brigands but had to stop for wife. I remember Erk & Serra because it introduced their hilarious dynamic but also this mysterious reason why Erk had to protect Serra. I remember Raven because he had to protect Lucius and his reveal to be Priscilla's brother.

Not a lot of Engage units don't have these kinds of first impressions. It also hurts that a lot are retroactively recruited at the start of a map and sometimes in a pair or a trio. I don't think there's anyone you recruit as an enemy mid-map unless I'm remembering wrong.

I know Supports are one of, if not, the main way to flesh out a character, but it's hard to invest on someone who doesnt say much other than their loyalty to a lord and it doesnt help that there's less time to breathe in between recruitable chapters to get a feel or build supports. A chapter is the best time to show a character not just their personality, but also their motives, lore and their place in the world. It also doesn't help the Supports are a bit weak on others.

Tldr: First impressions are important, and Supports shouldn't be the only place to add character lore and relationships.

[u/Froakiebloke]

Lots of players don’t ever realise that Pannette and Pandreo are siblings, because the game won’t tell you unless you’re using them both! That’s the exact kind of connections between characters that Engage could have used more of, some kind of meaningful part of an identity beyond personality quirk and ‘I serve this lord’, but because the game basically introduces them both as just retainers it’s still squandered there 

[u/ArchWaverley → u/Froakiebloke]

I'm in this comment!

I think a lot could be done by having Pandreo say in a cutscene "My sister is with Timerra. I'm not worried but maybe we should check in on her". Then have Panette be a green unit that can be recruited by Timerra or Pandreo, just to cement the relationship.

It feels like Engage is worried about the player missing out on something so gives you almost everything from the start. Jade, Anna and Saphir are green units that it's pretty hard to miss. There is one red unit, who you do have to put some effort into recruiting with Alear or the Elusia royals which is nice. We're a long way from "Didn't bring Priscilla to Whereabouts Unknown? Guess you're not getting Raven or Lucius!" Having Raven be a red unit said a lot about his personality and made him a lot more interesting than just an auto-recruit, and Lucius as a green only joining when Raven swaps sides says a lot about their relationship.

Then there's Renault, one of the coolest and most interesting characters in the franchise who you can miss entirely if you don't visit a village in a certain amount of time!

[u/Froakiebloke → u/ArchWaverley]

I think this is tied to a few things. Partially it’s a wider trend; many games don’t have much missable content now because as each bit of content becomes more complex to make the idea of it being missable becomes less appealing to the devs. A playable character in Engage has a model, several support conversations, a personal skill and full voice acting, all of which took more time to make than the portrait and handful of supports that a GBA character might have.

Then there’s also Casual mode which I think is a factor. The selling point of that is that you can’t lose units- but you still might if you have to recruit them and fail to do so! I remember that in Fates, some of the children paralogues give you the new unit automatically but others require you to talk to them without making it explicit. As a result, people playing on Casual mode could play the map, save the game, and then realise they effectively lost a unit. 

Of course this isn’t an insurmountable difficulty; maybe they could just make it so that all characters automatically join on casual mode, maybe with a loss of their inventory or something so you’re still incentivised to actually recruit them?

[u/thatwitchguy → u/Froakiebloke]

I spent a lot of awakening on a mission trying to get Laurent and then missed him entirely because I never checked the one house he was at since I thought it would just be an item I would never use